by Ruth Rendell
I will get him for what he's done, Wexford said to himself. Whatever it takes, I will get him. One day, no matter how far away and how long it takes. The murder of the innocent and harmless Billy Kenyon got to me like no other death by violence I have come across for a long time. If I let myself I could weep for Billy Kenyon, even now, after all these years, but I won't, of course I won't. I will watch him and wait and one day bring him to justice for Billy Kenyon and Elsie Carroll and perhaps too for Shirley Palmer.
Chapter 12
Three weeks later they came to him with the same subject on succeeding days. Hannah first, sandwiching her information between her report on Nicky Dusan and the health or lack of it of Tyler Pike. Jenny avoided the police station and came to his home. But they had the same thing to tell him. Yasmin Rahman had returned from Pakistan and Tamima with her. Tamima was not married, there was no husband and no marriage ceremony had taken place. They had come home early because Tamima was homesick.
'These children, they have their way these days, don't they?' Yasmin had told Hannah, echoing her husband.
'I hoped to have a word with her,' Hannah had said.
But Tamima wasn't there. In spite of what her mother had said, she was back working for her uncle at the Raja Emporium. 'She will soon be going to London to stay with her auntie in Kingsbury.'
Hannah remembered that this was exactly what Mohammed Rahman had told her would happen. She asked when that would be but Mrs Rahman said she didn't know. She was growing indignant by this time and Hannah finally had to acknowledge that she hadn't a leg to stand on when Tamima's mother said, 'I don't know why it interests you. She is free to do what she wants. What wrong has she done? What wrong have me and her father done?'
'Nothing, Mrs Rahman, nothing at all.' Hannah was appalled that she of all police officers might appear to be victimizing people for no more reason than that they were immigrants. 'I'm sorry. I'd no intention of upsetting you.'
'Tamima is over sixteen. She can leave home if she wants. You see, I know your law.'
Jenny had met with an even colder reception, in her case from Tamima's father. 'Tamima is working for her uncle. She's there because she likes to earn some money, as many young people do. Would you like to speak to her uncle? Or, better, would your husband like to speak to him? He, I think, is the policeman, not you.'
Shaken, Jenny said, 'No, no, of course not.' And, making matters worse, 'It's just that I've grown fond of Tamima and I want to see things turn out well for her.'
'And aren't I fond of my own daughter? My only daughter? Do you think I want her to be unhappy? Perhaps you should remember, Mrs Burden, that I am a childcare officer, specifically Myringham's teenage care manager. Don't you think maybe I know as much about adolescents' needs as you do?'
'Of course you do, of course.' Appalled, Jenny was admitting to herself that this man was too much for her. This man was a great deal cleverer, more sophisticated and astute than she had given him credit for. 'It's just that –'
He interrupted her. 'I'm sorry, Mrs Burden, but I am busy and cannot talk much longer. Tamima is planning to go to her auntie in London shortly. She will enjoy herself there, go out with her cousins. The length of time she stays is down to her and to my sister. Then she will come home and decide what her next move should be? OK? All right?'
'I had to be satisfied with that,' Jenny said.
'Aren't you?' Wexford raised his eyebrows. 'Dare I ask what all the fuss is about?'
'If that's your attitude, I give up,' said Jenny.
'I'm glad to hear it.' He changed the subject and spoke to Dora. 'Did Andy Norton come today?'
'He always comes on Thursdays. Well, twice he's changed to a Tuesday but he's always phoned well in advance to let me know. Three o'clock. You could set your watch by him.'
On the following Thursday he got home early. Andy Norton was still there, still engaged in cutting back the lushly overgrown shrubs and climbers which covered the rear garden wall. Wexford saw a tall thin man, white-haired and gaunt. He went outside, introduced himself and noted the mellifluous tones and fine enunciation conferred on its alumni by Eton College.
'You're doing overtime,' he said with a smile.
'I want to get things shipshape before the rain starts.'
'Shipshape', the word Targo had used long ago. He watched Norton get into his ancient but gleaming Morris Minor and drive away, waving as he went.
It was later in the evening that Dora told him. He had noticed when he got home from work how especially nice she looked in a new dark green dress and high-heeled dark green shoes. Her legs had always been one of her best features with their long calves and fine ankles. Round her neck she wore a necklace of gold and green garnets he had once given her. In his eyes she hadn't lost her looks at all; only in her own was she less attractive than she had been. He remembered how he used to compare her – was 'contrast' rather the word? – with other men's wives and how there was really no competition. He smiled and complimented her on her appearance.
She smiled back, thanked him, said, 'I've been meaning to tell you. There's been a white van parked outside here for most of the afternoon. That's the second time this week. It was here on Tuesday too. I went out to check if it had a residents' parking pass in the windscreen but it hadn't. Still, the traffic warden didn't appear. They never do when you want them.'
Far from smiling now, he felt a sharp chill, like icy water trickling down his spine, the warmth her evident pleasure had brought him all gone.
'As a matter of fact, I took the number.'
He looked at the slip of paper she held out to him. It was Targo's. Of course it was.
'It comes of being married to a policeman,' she said.
He tried to speak casually, 'Dora, don't do that again. I mean, don't check up on a vehicle's right to park. Please.'
'But why, darling?'
'Suppose I said, because I say so? Would that be enough?'
'That's what you say to children. All right, then. But I would quite like to know.'
The white van didn't come back to Wexford's street the next day or the next. That meant little. Targo had at least one other car. Wexford decided not to frighten Dora by asking her if she had seen a silver Mercedes parked where the van had been. Nor was he going to ask her if there had been a dog in the van. Besides, Targo might well have a collection of motor vehicles. Or he might do his surveillance on foot, parking the van farther away and walking the Tibetan spaniel half a mile or so.
What puzzled Wexford was the question of whom Targo was keeping under observation and why. Not himself, surely. The man must know he was out of the house all day. So he was watching Dora. Wexford didn't like that at all. Only a few days ago, he had half made up his mind that Targo had abandoned his need to kill, had become a law-abiding citizen. Now he thought of the two occasions he had seen that van in Glebe Road. On both Targo had been calling on the Rahmans because one of the sons was an IT consultant, a legitimate reason for a visit. But Ahmed Rahman might have knowledge of Targo which would be invaluable to him. His thoughts went back to his wife.
Two years before, along with four other people, she had been abducted and held hostage by a group of countryside campaigners. He still thought of the three nights and four days as the worst period of his life. Suppose I lost her? was the question he kept asking himself. Suppose I never see her again? When she came back, he had sworn to himself that he would value her more, and for the most part he had stuck to that. He had appreciated her more and had shown it. But there was no reason to suppose that what had happened then would happen again. As far as he knew, Targo had never abducted anyone. He felt that cold trickle again when he spoke aloud what Targo did: 'He kills. It's a hobby with him'. He had killed at least one woman and one man, possibly two women. Maybe there had been others, 'unregistered in vulgar fame'. He remembered what Kathleen Targo had said to him when they met all those years ago in the Kingsbrook Precinct, 'He likes animals. He doesn't like people.'
&
nbsp; What was to be done? He could hardly send a PC to keep an eye on the street outside his house. In the eyes of everyone but himself, Targo had done no wrong. Perhaps he should start again on proving that the man was not the innocent he looked to be. It was Friday afternoon, a mild day in October. The trees were turning brown and their leaves had begun to fall. The sunshine was rather thin and the pale blue sky streaked with strings of cloud.
The walk to Glebe Road constituted half his daily exercise but he was held up – almost swept up – by the crowd of Muslim men returning home or to their work from Stowerton mosque. They seemed remarkably happy, laughing and joking with each other, though not rowdily, and he thought how different a group of home-going church attendees would have been. Be careful not to be an inverted racist, he told himself, you're just as much a racist as Hannah if you favour immigrants over indigenous people. Letting the crowd go ahead of him, he fell in behind them. Most lived in this neighborhood but by the time he was halfway up Glebe Road only two young men remained and an older man. Outside Webb and Cobb the older man paused to look between the boards which covered what had been a shop window and, apparently satisfied, passed on. They all turned into number 34. Mohammed Rahman and his sons, they must be, Tamima's father and brothers. He waited until they were inside before ringing the bell.
The door was opened by the son with the beard, the older one, Hannah had told him.
'Chief Inspector Wexford, Kingsmarkham Crime Management.' Wexford produced his warrant card. He had nearly said 'Kingsmarkham CID', for old habits died hard and to him the new title sounded like a mafioso managing a bunch of gangsters.
'You want my dad? He's inside with my brother. I'm off to work.'
Wexford walked in and was met in the narrow passage by a man of about fifty with black hair but a grey beard. He seemed to recognise Wexford, though Wexford had no recollection of ever having seen him before.
'Mohammed Rahman,' he said, held out his hand, and indicating the young man behind him, 'This is my son Ahmed.'
If the father seemed calm but wary, the son looked rather tense. He was a handsome man of perhaps twenty-five, pale-skinned with coal-black eyes and black hair. He had the face of a young Mogul emperor. They were absurdly crowded together in that narrow space, three tall men so close to each other that father and son had to shrink back to avoid touching Wexford while Wexford pressed himself against the wall.
'Come into the lounge,' said Mohammed Rahman.
A ridiculous word for a living room at any time, owing its provenance, Wexford thought, to early-twentieth-century Hollywood and luxury liners. Here it was less absurd than it might have been, for the room was unexpectedly spacious with ample light coming in through the conservatory. A large fireplace of stone blocks with a mantelpiece of polished granite held on its grate a bowl of dried flowers. Kali rugs covered the floor and the conservatory was full of plants, a pale blue lumbago, a rose-pink oleander, which, had they been outside, would by now have been killed by frost. Apart from the rugs, not a single object was what Wexford would have called 'oriental'. He was rather ashamed to confess to himself that he had expected the decor of an Indian restaurant.
He was shown to a black leather armchair. The two Rahmans waited expectantly, the father managing a smile, the son still ill at ease. 'Do you know a man called Eric Targo?' he asked them.
The tension slackened. It was interesting to watch this lightening in each of them. Had they expected him to talk about Tamima? Ahmed spoke for the first time. 'He's a client,' he said.
'Your client? You're a computer consultant, aren't you?'
The young man nodded. 'I work from home. I have an office upstairs.'
'You look after Mr Targo's computer? Service it? Mend it if it goes wrong?' He was aware he was using the wrong terminology.
Evidently Ahmed was also aware of it for he smiled. 'Mr Targo has three PCs. If he has a problem I talk him through it or I call at his house.'
'He has sometimes brought a computer here, Ahmed,' his father reminded him.
'That's right. So he did. His Toshiba, his laptop, that was. Look, let me explain. Some of my clients – well, they're not exactly computer-illiterate, I wouldn't say that. But they get a bit nervous. They don't quite understand that when something's wrong I can put it right if we're – well, both of us get online. That's when I can talk him through what's bothering him.' He looked searchingly into Wexford's face, in case the Chief Inspector failed to follow him. 'Anyway, that's how it is but a lot of clients think I have to have the PC here to look at. And that's when he brings the Toshiba in for me to deal with it.'
'I see.'
What Wexford really meant was that he didn't see – it amounted to mending a machine without touching it or even seeing it – but he accepted it and was satisfied. He hardly knew what he had suspected, for, whatever Targo's murderous propensities, he must have constant contact in business and his personal life with people whom he knew in honesty and innocence.
The trees in Glebe Road had begun to shed their leaves. Wexford started the walk back to the police station, recalling how when he was a child he always made a point of treading on a fallen leaf, enjoying the crunching sensation underneath his feet. He tried it now, crushing a dried crinkled plane leaf, and was pleased to find it gave him much the same feeling. But back to the Rahmans. There was nothing sinister about the Targo–Rahman connection, he thought. Nevertheless, the fact remained that Targo had resumed his stalking of him or, rather, begun stalking his wife. It came to him then that, in accordance with the old marriage service, a married couple used to be called 'one flesh' and, thinking of that, he felt a pang, as if what seemed a threatened hurt were being done to himself. The first thing he did when he was in his office was to send for DC Damon Coleman and, wondering if he might be doing something indefensible, considering that in everyone's eyes but his own Targo was an innocent man, set him to keep his own house under surveillance. The stalker stalked, he thought.
Some years before, when his daughter Sylvia had been taking a course in psychotherapeutic counseling, she had taught him about the 'box' as a means of dealing with anxieties.
'If you've a problem weighing on your mind, Dad, you have to visualize a box – maybe quite small, the size of a matchbox. You open it and put your worry inside – now don't start laughing. It works. Close the box with the worry inside and put it away somewhere, inside a drawer, say.'
'Why not throw it in the sea?'
'That's a bit final. You may want to take it out again one day.'
'And this is going to take all problems away?'
'I don't say that, Dad, but it might help. If you find yourself thinking of the worry you also think it's locked away in the box so you can't touch it.'
He had scoffed. But still he tried it. Several times since then he had put Targo in a box and sometimes it had worked well. He tried it again now, carefully placing Targo and the white van and a bunch of dogs and his own fear into the box and hiding it in a drawer of the desk in his office. And the white van failed to reappear. No silver Mercedes was parked in Wexford's street and no man with cropped white hair walking a Tibetan spaniel had been seen. It had, of course, no longer been possible to tell Damon Coleman of the distinguishing mark, the naevus on the neck. That was gone.
Damon had seen Dora Wexford leave the house twice on foot and twice in her car but he was sure she hadn't seen him. Damon was an expert in the role of the invisible watcher. A woman he recognised as Wexford's daughter Sylvia came once and stayed about an hour. Jenny Burden called with her son. Apart from these, the only caller he had seen was a man in his sixties who arrived on Thursday at three in the afternoon in an ancient Morris Minor. Damon finished his surveillance at five by which time the visitor had not come out.
This wasn't quite what Wexford had wanted. His wife and her callers were not to be watched but, rather, whoever might be watching her. Damon's report reminded him of the kind of thing a private detective might produce for a husband who believed h
imself deceived. That made Wexford smile. The idea of Dora's infidelity was absurd, even the mildest disloyalty out of the question.
But his fear was in the box and the box was shut up inside the top left-hand drawer of his desk. As often, when he used the box – the invisible container created by his own mind – the apprehensiveness or anxiety locked inside it had faded away. Just as the box had no real existence so it seemed that the fear had none either.
Rashid Hanif had just come out of the gates of his sixth-form college on the Kingsmarkham bypass when Hannah spoke to him. If she had simply walked up to him he might not have been so obviously taken aback, but he had seen her car draw up and park ahead of him and this very good-looking young woman he recognised from the Raja Emporium step out of it, flourishing a warrant card. He was good-looking himself, a tall handsome boy with pale skin, brown hair and grey-blue eyes.
Hannah could tell he was frightened and she wondered why. After all, he might be only seventeen but he was a man and most men – at any rate the innocent ones – were happy to speak to her. 'I'd like to ask you about Tamima,' she said. 'We could talk in my car. I could give you a lift home.'
Making that offer was a mistake. 'Oh, no. No, thanks. I don't need a lift home. I can walk.'
'I know you can walk,' Hannah said. 'I don't have to take you to your house, just to the corner of the street. Come on. Those books you're carrying must be heavy.'
He allowed her to shepherd him into the passenger seat of the car. Hannah had no intention of driving off immediately. She sat in the driving seat and turned to face him. 'I've seen you talking to Tamima in the Raja Emporium, Rashid. I've seen you quite a few times. She's your girlfriend, isn't she?'